David Vitter fuming about home elevation money being redirected to parish governments

A year ago, the state asked FEMA for $370 million, saying it would get 3,300 more families covered by its home-elevation grant program. The state got the money and $20 million more, but decided instead to send the entire sum to parishes for use in local disaster-proofing programs.

Brett Duke, Times-Picayune archiveU.S. Sen. David Vitter wasn't happy in December when he learned about the change of plans for FEMA grant money, and now he's letting the public in on it.

U.S. Sen. David Vitter wasn't happy in December when he learned about the change of heart, and now he's letting the public in on it. He sent a letter to Paul Rainwater, Gov. Bobby Jindal's commissioner of administration, wondering if the waiting homeowners will "just be left out in the cold -- again," and he distributed some of the correspondence at a recent town hall meeting.

"We wanted to call them on it," Vitter spokesman Luke Bolar said of the decision to go public with the senator's concerns. "Maybe at the time they had a reasonable explanation, but they never would share it with us. There was some conversation at different meetings where Rainwater's office said they would look into it. That's why we didn't go public with it initially."

Asked about Vitter's concerns, Christina Stephens, spokeswoman for the state's elevation program, said when FEMA released the additional money, it specified the money could not go into the state program.

But that's not how Rainwater explained the decision when the funds were first released in November. He said then that the state preferred to let parishes administer their own mitigation programs, and that the state was running its own effort only because of what former Gov. Kathleen Blanco had agreed to do with the initial FEMA aid.

FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Planning Group supervisor, Paul Thornton, wouldn't say whether FEMA forbade the state from using the new funds on its own program.

Of the $1.4 billion Louisiana initially received from FEMA to mitigate properties damaged in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a little more than half went to the $750 million state-run project for Road Home recipients. A few million went to various state departments for emergency preparedness, reconstruction projects at Jackson Barracks and the like. And $381 million went to parishes. Some ran their own home elevation projects. Others used it on drainage and other infrastructure.

FEMA provides states and local governments with Hazard Mitigation grants after disasters to better protect against future storms. The amount of aid is based on the amount of public assistance the agency pays to fix what was damaged in a particular storm.

In making his pitch for more, Rainwater laid out the priorities for what the state calculated would be an additional $370 million: $280 million to "fund an additional 3,680 homeowners currently enrolled in the Road Home program. .... We estimate approximately 3,312 homes will be elevated and an additional 368 homes will be rebuilt under the pilot reconstruction programs" for demolished properties. The second priority, about $90 million, was to go to "the most devastated parishes of Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines."

FEMA agreed, and even bumped it up to $390 million.

But in spite of the priorities laid out by Rainwater at the time, the Jindal administration decided to give all of the money to the parishes. Some parishes decided to use the money to run their own elevation programs, but others, like Orleans, plan to use it on other things, like a sewer and water power plant and drainage systems.

The decision is frustrating for Road Home recipients who were told they had been cleared for grants to raise their homes or build elevated houses from scratch, but now may be out of luck.

Cindy Gregg of Slidell said her husband was assured last October that more money was on its way from FEMA.

"We waited a month or so and never received any call or anything in the mail," she said. "So my husband called again to find out the status. He was told that our file has been closed and that we are not going to receive anything -- that they only had the ... 10,000 homes and we were not one of those homes."

Richard Bryson, who rebuilt his home in Shell Beach, had been in a similar holding pattern because he was in a dispute with his insurance company and couldn't provide the program with an exact amount of uncovered costs. He hadn't heard anything since November, so he called the program a few weeks ago.

"The guy told me the mitigation program is out of funds," he said.

Stephens said the elevation program, which has paid more than $402 million to about 7,800 households so far, is constantly reviewing applicants in the pipeline and moving people who are not currently on the "funded" list into the queue.

"We continue to process homeowner applications and work through our due diligence process to remove disinterested or nonresponsive homeowners and those who are ineligible because of duplication of benefits from the active pipeline," she said. "While we do inform homeowners if their properties were not included on the original list of properties submitted to FEMA, we also acknowledge that our pipeline is constantly moving and know that we absolutely will serve homeowners who were not originally included in the 10,500 universe."